You can tug and pull on the cage to change the shape of the surface. SubD, or sub division modeling, is a set of surfaces based on a cage of points. It’s like 3D CAD challenging 2D CAD in the mid 1990s. The more recent explosion of 3D scan and 3D print really pushes this data type right up in your face. Fusion 360 uses Tsplines for organic designĪs far as engineers would get involved would be a mesh in FEA or the export of an STL file – a set of points connected by lines to make polygonal shapes, tetrahedrals or quadrahedrals. They took another shot at it pre-2010 with better success, but it was still not really ready for prime time. The fact that it was so slow and you really couldn’t do much with it probably set back augmented reality by years.

I remember back in the late 90s when the first push for VRML was such a huge disappointment. As CAD users we have been conditioned to recoil in horror whenever confronted with incoming data like STL, OBJ, XYZ, or a number of other types.

I’ve been writing a little series of articles on various types of non-NURBS CAD data over on and.

Rhino subd to nurbs